Visualisation Matters 2018

OzViz 2018

AI + Creativity Symposium

Collision of Cultures

Visualisation Matters 2018 is designed to inspire audiences and demonstrate how art, science, design and engineering can be closely connected through visual creativity.

Event & Location

VisMatters2018 is co-organised by the Expanded Perception and Interaction Centre, UNSW Art & Design, CSIRO Data61 and ACEMS. It will be held on 21 November 2018 at UNSW Art & Design, Paddington (Sydney), Cnr Oxford St and Greens Rd, in Room EG02.

Allow to be Inspired

Invited speakers from industry, academia and our local community will share their ideas and works. We are preparing a few amazing surprises, so have your eyes wide open.

Format

Visualisation Matters will feature invited keynotes and speakers.

15
k+ lines of code

90
+ hack methods

512
+ litres of coffee

150
+ satisfied faces

ARTISTS-SCIENTISTS

Speakers that will inspire you. Discussions that will remain with you forever. Connections that will create new opportunities. Don't miss it!

Marco Tarini – Online visualization of hexahedral meshes

BIO

Marco Tarini (PhD, Pisa, 2003) works as an Associate Professor Associate Professor at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. He is active in many different research areas within Computer Graphics (rendering, geometry processing, acquisition, fabrication) and its applications (to scientific visualization, video games, cultural heritage). He authored more than 25 articles in the top three journals of the field, including several award winning ones. Marie Curie fellow (2004, at MPI, Saarbrueken), he received the Young Researcher Award by Eurographics in 2006. Marco serves as editor, chair, program chair, and IPC/ITC member for many journals and conferences in the field, including, among others, associate editor for Elsevier Computer and Graphics since 2017, conference chair of SGP 2019, and IPC member for SIGGRAPH ASIA in 2016. He works as core developer in open source projects, including MeshLab (for which he got an award in 2017 by Eurographics SGP) and QuteMol (molecular visualizer). An active educator, Marco has been teaching more than 35 university (undergraduate, Master or PhD) courses on Computer Graphics, Video Game Dev, Geometry Processing and others topics, at various universities worldwide.

Mike Seymour – Faces are the Emotional Dimension of Computing: Giving the world a better face

BIO

Mike Seymour has a B Sc. focused on CGI and Pure Maths from the University of Sydney where he also did his Masters and he currently has a PhD Fellowship. His research is into using interactive real time photoreal humans in new forms of entertainment and Human Computer Interfaces (HCI). Mike has worked for many years in the visual effects area of the entertainment industry, in R&D and in film production, winning an AFI and being nominated for an Emmy. He has worked as a compositor, vfx supervisor and second unit director on various TV shows here and in the UK. He is also well known for his work as a writer and consultant with the web sites fxguide.com and fxphd.com. Mike works to provide an important link between the film and vfx community and the advanced research community who constantly push the limits of technology. Mike has lectured and presented at NAB, ACM SIGGRAPH, CVMP and SMPTE. Has regularly contributed to Warner Bros., Paramount, News Corp, the BBC (radio) and WIRED Magazine (70+ times). Mike is based in Sydney, but has previously worked in Hollywood and London. And he makes a mean Margarita, something vital in this research space.

Mike does research into the use of photo real, realtime, computer generated people for new forms of interactive engaging entertainment, focused on AR applications and cutting edge shared experiences .

Sam Ferguson is a musician, researcher and programmer whose focus is to understand the effects of sound and music on human beings, is currently is a senior lecturer in the School of Software, Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney. He has around 60 publications in areas as diverse as spatial hearing and loudness research, to data sonification, emotion, and physical computing. He currently teaches in data analytics and human computer interaction and has also developed and implemented new subjects and degrees in these areas.

Carlos Dominguez – XR Learning Objects – A web based solution

BIO

Carlos Dominguez has been involved in online learning design and development in different institutions in Australia. He worked as research assistant at Bond University then as Business System Analyst at the University of the Sunshine Coast. For 5 years he was Online learning Educational Officer for the Centre for Open Education at Macquarie university. He is presently leading Immersive Technologies for the Educational Delivery Services, PVCE at UNSW.

Dr Victoria Coleman is a Nanometrologist – a scientist working at Australia’s National Measurement Institute on accurate and precise measurements at the scale of a billionth of a metre. Her group works on the development of methods and measurement standards to support nanotechnology, with a strong focus on the characterisation of nanomaterials. Victoria uses atomic force and electron microscopes to image nanomaterials and is interested in exploring how visualisation and advanced image analysis methods can improve the accuracy of her measurements and the understanding of measurement uncertainty.

Huyen Nguyen – Immersive Analytics of Honey Bee Data

BIO

I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the EPICentre, UNSW Art & Design in Sydney, NSW, Australia. My academic background focuses on Visual Analytics, Human-Computer Interaction, and Human Factors in Collaborative Mixed Reality. I was an OCE postdoctoral fellow at Data61, CSIRO in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, working on the Global Initiative for Honey bee Health (GIHH) and focusing on Data Visualisation and Immersive Analytics in Collaborative Frameworks. I received my M.Sc. degree in Intelligent Systems and Multimedia from University of La Rochelle, France in 2011 and my Ph.D. degree in Virtual Reality and 3D User Interactions from INSA Rennes, France in 2014.

Tia Cummins – Frayed Nerves & the Cognitive casualties of war

BIO

Tia is a neuroscientist, specialising in military mental health. Tia recently completed her PhD at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience & Mental Health, investigating the effects of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder on Alzheimer’s disease in Australian Vietnam war veterans. For this project, Tia investigated diminished brain function and evidence of Alzheimer’s disease in veterans using a combination of neuroimaging, neuropsychological and psychiatric assessment, and genotyping. Having served in the British Army for three years, Tia is passionate about military mental health and understanding the signature wounds of warfare. Tia is now working with the EPIcentre to develop a new treatment for PTSD using VR.

Professor Thomas is the current the Deputy Director of the Advanced Computing Research Centre and Co-Director of the Wearable Computer Laboratory at the University of South Australia.
He is currently a CSIRO Adjunct Science Fellow, Senior Member of the ACM, Senior Member of the IEEE, and Visiting Professor (Global) Keio University. His current research interests include: wearable computers, user interfaces, augmented reality, virtual reality, visualisation,
CSCW, tabletop display interfaces, and the use of cognitive psychology in virtual environments research.

Prof. Thomas’ academic qualifications include the following:
1) B.A. in Physics, George Washington University;
2) M.S. in Computer Science, University of Virginia with a thesis titled:
Pipeline Pyramids in Dynamic Scenes; and
3) Ph.D. in Computer Science, Flinders University with a thesis titled:
Animating Direct Manipulation in Human Computer Interfaces

Prof. Thomas has over 200 publications, has been cited over 5800 times, and has an h-index of 39 as calculated by Google Citations. His experience includes working at the School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences, University of South Australia since 1990. He has run his own computer consultancy company. He was a Computer Scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (A major US government laboratory for the Department of Commerce.), and a software engineer for the Computer Sciences Corporation and the General Electric Company.

Sean O’Donoghue – Transforming how biomedical data is seen

BIO

Conjoint Professor Seán O’Donoghue (BABS, UNSW), is a Lab Head and Senior Faculty Member at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, and a Chief Research Scientist in CSIRO’s Data61. He has created numerous award-winning bioinformatics resources such as Reflect, Minardo, and Aquaria. He chairs VIZBI, an international conference series on data visualisation methods in the life sciences. These resources are accessed by tens of thousands of scientists worldwide each year. Professor O’Donoghue’s contributions have been recognised with a C.J. Martin Fellowship from the NHMRC, an Achievement Award from Lion Bioscience AG, and by election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He received his B.Sc. and PhD in biophysics from the University of Sydney. Much of his career was spent in Germany at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and at Lion Bioscience AG.

Dr Jen Seevinck – Creative interaction with data

BIO

Dr Jen Seevinck is an electronic artist and researcher who creates digital, interactive art systems. Her practice is driven by conceptual questioning and design for audience experience. In her work with technology and science, she is primarily concerned with emergence, data and interaction aesthetics. Jen has exhibited at contemporary art galleries in Beijing, Tokyo, Australia and the U.S.A. She is a Senior Lecturer in Interaction and Visual Design at the Creative Industries at Queensland University of Technology. Her research publications include the recent monograph ‘Emergence in Interactive Art’ (Springer, 2017).

Oliver Bown is senior lecturer and co-director of the Interactive Media Lab at the faculty of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. He is a researcher and maker working with creative technologies, with a highly diverse academic background spanning social anthropology, evolutionary and adaptive systems, music informatics and interaction design, with a parallel career in electronic music and digital art spanning over 15 years. He is interested in how artists, designers and musicians can use advanced computing technologies to produce complex creative works. His current active research areas include media multiplicites, musical metacreation, the theories and methodologies of computational creativity, new interfaces for musical expression, and multi-agent models of social creativity.

John Doolan – Living dangerously with live technology

BIO

John is a rendering and interactive graphics guru based in Sydney Australia. He’s been in the Australian development scene for over 20 years. He has been lead programmer on multiple published AR/VR projects including World Square Lunar New Year AR and Infiniti VR.

He is a co-founder of the Official UE4 Sydney Meetup and has taught VR courses at Academy Xi.

Nico Pietroni – Molding is the new Black

BIO

Nico Pietroni is a senior lecturer in the School of Software within FEIT at UTS. His research focus is within the fields of computer graphics and geometry processing and investigates concepts and practical algorithms for the creation and manipulation of digital shape representation. A particluar interest of his is in how geometry processing intersects with architecture, artistic modelling and digital fabrication. His primary goal is to push the boundaries of current industrial production pipelines by exploiting the theoretical foundations in geometry processing. This includes mesh parametrization, surface abstraction and global optimization applied to the entertainment industry, digital fabrication and architectural geometry.

With a passion to bridge the gap between art, digital media, content and culture, Emile ensures VANDAL is focused on creating the most innovative moving image and sound for digital media of all types. He further oversees curation of the VANDAL Art Gallery in Redfern.

Emile’s work regularly features in local and international awards, festivals and publications including TEDxSydney, shots, Creative Review, The One Show, Cannes, Clio and AWARD. He’s a frequent guest, keynote speaker and jury member at creative events around the globe. Highly motivated with excellent communication skills, his recognised talent earns international respect and he’s regarded as one of Australia’s most prolific new media creative directors.

Sam Moskwa – A Look Inside The Supercomputer

BIO

Sam Moskwa believes that by performing complex computations on supercomputers we will one day find evidence of little green men. However, we probably shouldn’t trust the discovery any more than an anecdote about cow abductions because many computational processes are irreproducible. His first job was in the computer games industry but quickly returned to university where he fell into a role working with bioinformaticians studying grass and physicists exploring quantum chromodynamics.

Later, as a member of CSIRO’s Scientific Computing team, he spent years helping researchers write software that would run quickly and correctly on one supercomputer only for it to be replaced with a radically different machine. He is now the CEO of Australasian eResearch Organisations (AeRO) and focused on the digital workforce that supports research. He misses the coding.

Anna is a data scientist in CSIRO Data61 currently working on Stellargraph, the machine learning library for graphs. She has 10+ years of experience working on various applied data science problems such as the detection of fraudulent activities and money laundering using social networks, the bankruptcy predictions using companies’ financial networks, and predictions of deviant cases in business processes.

Anna received her PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Tartu, Estonia.

Douglas Kahn – Experience and live energy configurations

BIO

Douglas Kahn is Professor of Media and Innovation at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW Art & Design, University of New South Wales, Sydney. His books include: Energies in the Arts (MIT Press, 2019); Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013); Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, edited with Hannah Higgins (UC Press, 2012); Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973 (UC Press, 2011); Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999); and Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde, edited with Gregory Whitehead (MIT Press, 1992). He has presented over one hundred keynotes and invited lectures around the world, and has been an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation.

Xavier is a creative software engineer in the Data61 Front End Development team, and in the Data61 Investigative Analytics Tech Program working on Stellargraph. Prior to joining them, Xavier’s visualisation work for the CSIRO TraNSIT project contributed to being awarded the Australian Government’s Agricultural Competitiveness White Paper. He recently submitted his doctoral dissertation on idea network visualisations to The University of Sydney in October, 2018.